Forum:Joe Steele the Novel
So in my wanderings, I went to the Penguin books website (publishers of RB, IatD, Atlantis, DoI, etc.) and found this volume scheduled for 2015 called "Joe Steele". My initial thought was that it was just a new way to make the short story available via e-book, but then I see it's 448 pages. So my next thought is that it's a collection, a la Atlantis and Other Places, which would be nice. Certainly the odds favor that--Supervolcano is done, and we haven't seen a new collection since AaOP in 2010. But then I also remembered that college talk HT gave where he mentioned off-handily that he had a manuscript due at the end of February, and I see this book is scheduled for April, 2015, and I remember that IatD was a short story before it was a novel.... However, I don't see JS being expanded into a novel. It's a fairly remarkable bit of economic story-telling, charting Steele's rise, rule as POTUS, and death in less than 15 pages, and really leaves no room for expansion. The logical follow up would be the J. Edgar Hoover years, not expanding 15 pages into 448. Anyway, in case anyone cares. TR (talk) 21:09, May 29, 2014 (UTC) :Hmm, interesting. I hadn't realized it had been so long since the last anthology, but you're right. Maybe it will include all the shorts he's written since then. :I do hope that, assuming it is a collection, it includes at least one or two new stories. I eventually bought AaOP in mass market paperback format, but still felt like I was being mildly ripped off even then. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:09, May 30, 2014 (UTC) :Actually, taking another look at that product page, I'm wondering--this is a bit of a long shot, I admit--if it might be a collection of short stories edited by HT rather than written by him, and if JS is his own contribution. If so I wonder what the theme of the collection might be. AHs of Stalin? AHs of the USSR, or Russia, generally? AHs showing a variety of ways in which American democracy might fail? In all of those cases I would think they'd want a catchier title, but if the collection is almost a year off, and has no cover or blurb or anything like that, the title may just be a placeholder. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:13, May 30, 2014 (UTC) ::I had a similar thought, an Alternate Stalins type work, like the [[A Massachusetts Yankee in King Arthur's Court|''Alternate Kennedys]]'' volume from the 1990s. I also considered that it could be an anthology along the lines of A Different Flesh, with various tales from the Joe Steele-verse. TR (talk) 20:39, May 30, 2014 (UTC) :::The idea of a collection of related works would have to be by other authors since Turtledove hasn't published any Joe Steele type shorts. That, I think, would make it more like Alternate Kennedys than A Different Flesh since I think it unlikely others would be that interested in playing in the short story universe HT created. If so, it might get a sub-title when it is published like: Joe Steele: Alternate Stalins. As for a collection of recent Turtledove short stories, I don't see him republishing "Joe Steele" so soon so it probably would be titled after a different, recent story. In any case, I am interested in seeing what comes of this. ML4E (talk) 21:48, May 30, 2014 (UTC) ::::Opening Atlantis is a better example of what I had in mind than ADF--not sure why I didn't go with that one to begin with. TR (talk) 19:36, June 10, 2014 (UTC) ::::Incidentally, I edited the link as it seems to have changed ever so slightly. There is a hardcover being solicited, which still tells us nothing about the final nature of what this book will be. TR (talk) 19:36, June 10, 2014 (UTC) ::::::Greetings everyone! Good to be back after a looong absence. I'm excited if this is indeed a new work. Any chance the page count could be wrong? Peter Tsouras's Defeat at Stalingrad spent about 6 months on Amazon listed at 20 pages, and it took several e-mails to Amazon to correct it to 172 or whatever it was. JudgeFisher (talk) 20:21, June 10, 2014 (UTC) :::::::Welcome back. It's certainly possible that the page count is wrong; it's early yet. I wouldn't bet anything of value on it. TR (talk) 21:50, June 10, 2014 (UTC) :::::::Welcome back Your Honor. Any chance the page count is wrong? With the bare bones product page and with some memories of previous such pages, I'd say there's some chance of just about anything you can think of. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:08, June 11, 2014 (UTC) Amazon is now listing this in HC and Kindle. While it reveals nothing about content, it does tend to suggest that this is more than just another way to purchase the individual story by itself. TR (talk) 17:55, June 12, 2014 (UTC) It is a novel Just clicked on the link. It is a novel. Well, shit. That's going to make our whole Joe Steele category a big pain in the ass. At least with ItPoME, the short story became chapter one of the novel, so making a distinction between the short story and the novel was unnecessary. "Joe Steele" on the other hand...not so much. God, of all the stories to expand into a novel, he picks the one that's among his most complete. "The Daimon" has so much potential, just to name something at random. TR (talk) 22:51, June 19, 2014 (UTC) :Ugh. I couldn't agree with you more. I can't think of much of anything that can be added to the short story. I can't imagine introducing new characters with subplots driven by the events of JS whose stories have to be told in this of all timelines. I'm hugely disappointed. Turtle Fan (talk) 02:21, June 20, 2014 (UTC) ::I'm going to reverse myself slightly, as I was thinking about this last night, and it occurred to me a novel could examine at least one character better than the story did: Ioseb Dze Jugashvili himself. ::The story's primary purpose was to engage in a quick thought experiment based on a line from a Janis Ian song. Turtledove devoted no time or energy into exploring just how an American-raised Ioseb still grows up to be President Stalin, it just worked that way because the story required it. We had a third-person semi-omniscient narrator snarkily describing 20 years of horror, without much interest in motivation or thought. ::A novel, on the other hand, could serve as further examination of Joe Steele's life, and how even in his changed circumstances, he still grows up to be Stalin. If Turtledove's does that, then I would be more inclined to read the novel. (I think Steele will have to be a POV anyway, given the nature of the story.) :::Sounds like you're suggesting we hear about his early life? ::::Could be. TR (talk) 16:00, June 21, 2014 (UTC) :::With the story reproduced as the final chapter, rather than the first as in ItPoME? "This is how I became the monster." Could be poignant. One can't really do that with a straight-up historical fiction without drawing a lot of fire (though Richard Lourie boldly attempted it some years ago and my God what a fine book that was!) Adding so radical an AH twist can misdirect some radical kneejerk reflexes. ::::No, the narrative of the story and the summary provided by Penguin suggest that the novel will be on the incidents of the story. But perhaps a lengthy prologue focusing on Steele's American childhood and rise to prominence in California, or digressions for that purpose. Obviously, the American Steele's background is probably not going to be as interesting as OTL Stalin's: we here in the US tend to frown on revolutionary bank robbers taking public office. TR (talk) 16:00, June 21, 2014 (UTC) :::::So it would reproduce the short story with every few paragraphs breaking for a chapter or two of flashbacks? That . . . doesn't sound all that encouraging. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:11, June 22, 2014 (UTC) :::It doesn't change the fact that, as you said yesterday, "Joe Steele" is near the bottom of the list of shorts that are crying out for expanded treatment. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:19, June 21, 2014 (UTC) ::::Shit, it didn't even make my list. But, it's fait accompli, so I might as well contemplate why I should read it. TR (talk) 16:00, June 21, 2014 (UTC) :::::In one sense I'd rather see this story expanded if the other option were a truly dreadful story like "Someone Is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy" or "It's the End of the World As We Know It, And We Feel Fine." But only in one sense, because even then, both of those stories left the door wide open to world building possibilities. Neither world is worth the effort, but the possibilities do abound. Looking over the bibliography in the next tab I'm hard pressed to name a single story that would more tightly constrain an expansion. Still, as you say, all we can do now is hope for the best. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:11, June 22, 2014 (UTC) ::And really, HT's going to have to do a lot to get readers to read this 448 page novel rather than just stick with the story (which is now a 10 page summary, I guess). Some of his twee-er ideas, like Molotov, Kaganovich, & Mikoyan all being Americans will hopefully be scrapped. I'm sure there are plenty of historical US politicians who could play those roles (If there must be a guy called "the Hammer" on Steele's team, so be it, but give us someone who isn't Vyacheslav Skryabin.) :::That . . . could be interesting, albeit rather drily so. I will at best once again take a wait-and-see approach to this one; let someone else (likely you, I'm afraid) immerse himself in it and report back before I decide whether to invest the time on a topic to which my first response is a skeptical, somewhat disappointed shrug. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:19, June 21, 2014 (UTC) ::Incidentally, I have a hypothesis as to why this story is getting expanded into a novel now: the panicked and nonsensical conspiracy theories about Obama as IslamoNaziCommie dictator. The original story was published in 2003. While there was concern about the Bush Administration and what it might do post-9/11, it was considerably less mainstream than the almost pathological delusions about Barack Obama as an American President Stalin (or Hitler, or whomever). This whole weirdness prompted HT to go back to that old story and say "No, THIS is what American President Stalin looks like." TR (talk) 20:58, June 20, 2014 (UTC) :::Looking back I think the incidence and intensity of vitriol and paranoid fantasy among the opposition has been more or less the same over this administration and the one before it (and has only risen slightly since the one before that). What's new and disturbing is the opposition's willingness to elect admitted saboteurs. Pelosi rode to the speaker's chair on a broad-based wave of dissatisfaction which regularly burned white-hot; but while Bush's second term is not exactly going to be remembered as a golden age of presidential politics, it was a good bit more effective in retrospect than it seemed at the time: the implementation of a (somewhat) winning strategy in Iraq that even Obama pretty much stuck with (a victory which is starting to look sadly temporary), the bailout that got a floor under the free-falling recession and bought a bit of breathing room for Team Obama to stabilize the situation (as bad as it is it could be so much worse), some pretty significant foreign aid commitments that paid off in an increase in international goodwill. :::Now of course you can't get shit out of congressional Republicans; they make the Democrats who preceded them during the Bush years look like Webster and Clay by comparison. They do seem to have internalized the paranoia that used to be confined to rhetorical flourish, which could explain the urgency with which they feel the need to kick over the apple cart. In such an environment it would be useful to be reminded of what American totalitarianism would really look like. I wonder if, as with MwIH (to a lesser degree than was widely perceived at the time), this might be an attempt to plant the seeds of thought in voters' minds? Turtle Fan (talk) 04:19, June 21, 2014 (UTC) Historical In-Joke?